Prompt: Coping with College Pressures (Essay 1)
To-Do Date: Apr 12 at 11:00pm
Readings
Read these articles to help you better understand college pressures, to think through the various ways in which people cope with them, and to discover evidence that you can use to support your essay’s claims:
“College Pressures”Links to an external site. (Zinsser)
“Making the Grade” (Wiesenfeld)
“Crisis U”Links to an external site. (Marano)
“Why College Students Today Are So Burned Out”Links to an external site. (Stern)
“Classroom Peer Pressure: A Mixed Blessing”Links to an external site. (Cuddy and Reeves)
“Parental Pressures and Suicidal ThoughtsLinks to an external site.” (Nutrition Health Review) [To view, sign in to the LCC library databases.]
Development and Validation of Student’s Sources of Stress ScaleLinks to an external site. (Nisa and Nizami) – Focus on the first part of the source; skim the rest. [To view, sign in to the LCC library databases.]
Fast Facts: Tuition Costs of Colleges and UniversitiesLinks to an external site. (National Center for Education Statistics) [skim]
Preliminary Study Questions
Before starting on the essay task, answer each of these reader-response questions in a brief paragraph, including textual evidence to support your answers as needed:
Of the four pressures that Zinsser says college students face, which pressures do you experience the most? (How do you know?)
What coping strategies do you use to respond to those pressures? Are those strategies effective?
What other strategies do you or could you use to reduce or eliminate some of those pressures?
Is your experience with college pressure typical? How does it compare with the experiences of other students?
Essay Issue Question
Once you have thought about and answered the discussion questions, write an essay that takes and defends a stance in response to the essay issue question:
What’s the most important thing students should do in response to the pressures of college?
After defining what it means for a response to be “important” or significant, the essay needs to explain not only why the selected response is important or significant but also to show why it’s more important than other potential responses. In other words, it should show by comparison why other responses are less important than the primary response (but not necessarily unimportant).
The essay should cite evidence from our shared readings, including Zinsser and the supplemental readings, and should include personal anecdotes as appropriate to support its claims.
To clarify its thesis claim, the essay should explain why a response is important. (It’s not enough simply to assert that some action is important; the essay needs to defend the assertion by showing why such a response is important in some way.)
This essay can be developed and organized as a type of “problem/solution” essay. Establishing the existence of the problem (convincing readers that it exists and is significant) typically happens in the first part of the body, with textual evidence from the readings as support for its claims; then the second part of the body typically presents the proposed solution (the “most important” response to the pressures of college) and defends the effectiveness or appropriateness of it; finally, the third part compares the proposed response with other potential responses (alternate stances on the issue), arguing why the proposed response is the best one.
Since the essay will cite supporting information paraphrased from outside sources, the sources must be credited both in text and in full citations in the Works Cited list (separated from the essay with a page break at the end of the document) to avoid plagiarism.
My thesis statement is ” The most important thing students should do in response to the pressures of college is to take breaks for self-care”